Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution 1789-1799 - Vol. 1

HEBERT, JACQUES-RENE ( 1757-94), member of the Paris Commune, dechristianizer, leader of the Paris sans-culottes. Born in Alençon in 1757, Hébert
was the son of a jeweler and a mother of bourgeois background. Young Jacques
lost his father at age nine, but his mother, who was some thirty years younger
than her husband, lived on for another twenty years. Thus, his education was
largely under her influence. She enrolled him in the Jesuit collège of Alençon
where he acquired the usual education in Latin and the classics. As a young
man, he became involved in a romantic affair with a young widow, leading to
a trial in which he was sued for slander by a rival, lost the case, and was forced
to leave for Paris in 1780. For the next decade he lived in poverty. In 1790, he
began to publish the Père Duchesne, which became the most popular of all the
Revolutionary journals. At last he had found his métier.

The popularity of Le Père Duchesne rested on its author's unusual talent to
speak the patois of the streets and army camps. F. Brunot called Hébert the
"Homère de l'ordure," but it must be remembered that the untutored masses
who read his newspaper and were moved by the "great anger" or the "great
joy" of Père Duchesne could hardly have been touched by polite expression or
classical allusion. The journal was an accurate expression of the way the sans-
culottes expressed themselves. Moreover, it taught them politics as seen through
the eyes of the man who spoke as a Revolutionary democrat and expressed their
needs and concerns. Hébert freely admitted that the journal was not written for
"des demoiselles" of his day. Moreover, its scurrilous language expressed the
frustrations and disappointments felt by the sans-culottes who had sacrificed so
much but who had received so little in return.

Like so many others, Hébert turned his back on the constitutional monarchy
and became an ardent republican after Louis' flight to Varennes. What he wanted,
however, was not a bourgeois republic but a democratic one. He was indignant
at the division of Frenchmen into active and passive citizens and denounced the
substitution of an aristocracy of birth by one of wealth. A few weeks before the

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